Untouchable

by Randall Sullivan

  “I asked him one long-winded question after another, mostly of the ‘Isn’t it true . . . ?’ variety,” Mesereau recalled. “Basically, it allowed me to testify on my client’s behalf.” While Mesereau and Yu were pleased by Melville’s warning that he would consider holding Bashir in contempt for his failure to answer questions, they were far more delighted by the judge’s decision that the jury could view the videotapes of Bashir‘s outtakes. “I was pretty sure that they would eventually despise Bashir just as much as I did,” the attorney said.

  Sneddon next called to the stand Santa Barbara County sheriff’s deputy Albert Lafferty, who had been responsible for videotaping and photographing the Neverland Ranch raid. This was in some ways the most difficult hour of the trial for Michael, Mesereau would say later. Lafferty had been part of a veritable army of law enforcement officers who arrived at Neverland at just after nine on the morning of November 18, 2003, and were still searching the premises fourteen hours later. The deputy narrated a twelve-minute DVD offering a virtual tour of Michael Jackson’s private world that was far more detailed and invasive than anything that had been shown in Martin Bashir’s hour-long “cultural-affairs program.”

  The exterior shots of Neverland’s main house, arcade, train station, zoo, and amusement park were familiar to much of America, but very few people had ever peeked inside the guest cottage where Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando stayed during their visits to the ranch, or gazed upon the fleet of Rolls-Royces and Bentleys that filled the garage.

  Lafferty formally began his guided tour at the ornate wrought-iron entrance gate to the ranch that was staffed by life-size mannequin security figures. From that moment forward, who or what might be “real” became the fundamental, if unintended, theme of the deputy’s video. More mannequins appeared in frame after frame once Lafferty was inside the main house, many of them child-size figures hiding in corners, or doing handstands and somersaults in hallways or foyers. There were white marble naked cherubs posed on the magnificent parquet floors along with blowups, cutouts, and papier-mâché statues of characters that included Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and most of the cast of the Star Wars movies, along with Mickey Mouse, Michael Jordan, Tinker Bell, Indiana Jones, Bruce Lee, the Ninja Turtles, and assorted knights in shining armor. Life-size photographs of Shirley Temple, Charlie Chaplin, and the Three Stooges were strewn among huge posters depicting the characters from The Wizard of Oz, Pinocchio, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Bambi, and Singin’ in the Rain. The stiff-backed members of a kitchen staff costumed in formal black-and-white outfits looked like mannequins themselves for a moment until one of them moved suddenly, drawing gasps from the jury and the courtroom gallery.

  The piles of stuff cluttering the house, especially Michael’s bedroom, were staggering: Christmas decorations, coffee-table books, tennis racquets, Game Boys, boom boxes, stuffed animals, stacks of books, heaps of DVDs, hats of every conceivable description, and hundreds of toys still in boxes, some half opened, others still sealed. Peter Pan was everywhere: There were giant posters and cutouts dangling from strings, there were photographs of Bobby Driscoll as Peter in the Disney film, and the camera took in a jewel-encrusted Peter Pan figurine. Lafferty showed his audience the bedroom filled with dolls, the huge gold throne where a mannequin of a child was doing a handstand in the seat, and the glass cases filled with the most valuable collection of Disney figurines not owned by Walt’s relatives. The deputy’s camera led them around a living room so large that it was hung with three crystal chandeliers, and lingered at length on the elaborately fashioned small-scale castle—complete with moat and guarded by child-size figurines—that took up much of the floor space. Lafferty had been equally attentive to the enormous paintings of Michael that hung all over the walls of the lower level of the main house, most depicting him as either a king or an angel. The deputy gave the courtroom crowd a long but blurry look at the sparkly blue comforter on Michael’s bed and The Last Supper painting that hung above it. He then showed them the closet where Michael’s clothing hung in color-coordinated sections, letting the jurors see that he possessed an apparently limitless supply of the crisp white dress shirts, striped black slacks, and brocade vests he wore to court each day.

  After the courtroom’s TV screen went blank Michael’s lower lip trembled and tears smudged the makeup at the corners of his eyes. Mesereau stood to make the point that the authorities in Santa Barbara County had used more police manpower to raid Michael Jackson’s home than had ever been used in the pursuit of a serial killer anywhere in the United States.

  The first Arvizo called to the stand was Gavin Arvizo’s eighteen-year-old sister Davellin, the most sympathetic and likeable member of her family. She told the jury about her family. While growing up poor in East Los Angeles, Davellin explained, her brother Gavin had been diagnosed with a mysterious but terrifyingly aggressive stage-four cancer that by the age of thirteen had cost the boy a kidney, his left adrenal gland, the tip of his pancreas, his spleen, and multiple lymph nodes. A sixteen-pound tumor had been removed from his abdomen and a double round of chemotherapy had left him throwing up blood in the middle of the night.

  The girl described at length how the family had gained access to assorted celebrities through a “comedy camp” for inner-city kids held at the Laugh Factory on the Sunset Strip, and how her mother Janet passed along Gavin’s “dying wishes” to the club’s owner, Jamie Masada. At the top of that list was meeting his heroes Chris Tucker, Adam Sandler, and Michael Jackson. The Arvizos never got near Sandler, but were taken under the protection of both Tucker and Jackson, each of whom showered Gavin and his siblings with gifts and attention. Michael had seemed so kind and humble back at the beginning, Davellin remembered, regularly calling Gavin at his grandparents’ home to tell the boy how to visualize his healthy cells eating up the cancer cells “like Pac-Man.” After her parents split up and her father took off with the family car, Michael gave her mom a Ford Bronco she could use to drive Gavin to and from his doctor appointments.

  Everything seemed to change, though, Davellin said, after the Bashir documentary aired on ABC. She and her family flew from California to Florida aboard Chris Tucker’s private jet on the day that Living with Michael Jackson was to be broadcast. When they arrived at the Turnberry Isle resort near Miami, where Jackson was putting them up, Davellin recalled, Michael seemed “kind of, like, upset” and said he didn’t want them to watch the program. Michael and Gavin met “privately” for several minutes, Davellin said, and afterward her brother began to act differently, “very hyper, very talkative, running around, very playful, more talkative, more jumpy.”

  As they prepared to return to Neverland, her brother was given a $75,000 watch and a rhinestone-studded jacket as gifts (Sneddon had called them “bribes” in his opening statement). Back at the ranch, Dieter Wiesner gave her and the rest of the family a list of “nice things” to say about Michael when they appeared in what would become known as the “rebuttal video,” Davellin testified, and told them not to talk about “what goes on at the ranch.” The girl then described walking into the wine cellar at Neverland to find Jackson pouring wine into cups for her brothers Star and Gavin, who were twelve and thirteen at the time.

  Sneddon had already told the jury that it was during this stay at Neverland that Jackson began to sexually abuse Gavin Arvizo. How had her brother’s behavior changed during that time? Sneddon asked Davellin. “He didn’t want to be hugged, he didn’t want to be kissed,” the girl replied. “It just hurts because I’m his older sister.” Had she seen the defendant touch her brother inappropriately? Sneddon asked. “Michael Jackson was constantly hugging [Gavin] and kissing him on the cheek or on the head,” the girl replied.

  Davellin then described how the Arvizos were “held captive” (Sneddon’s words) at the Calabasas Country Inn after leaving Neverland in spring 2003, under the constant observation of Jackson employees and Frank Cascio and Vinnie Amen. (Because Cascio and Amen had been named by Sneddon as “unindi
cted coconspirators,” the two were prevented from testifying themselves.) “Vinnie and Frank said not to leave,” the girl testified. “We couldn’t leave the room, so we didn’t even bother to ask [to go out] because we knew the answer would be no.” It was for their own good, the family was told, according to Davellin: “There was one time when Frank told us there were death threats on us.”

  What Mesereau wanted the jury to hear was the audiotape of an interview the Arvizos had given to Mark Geragos’s private investigator, Bradley Miller, back in February 2003. That interview had proceeded on two tracks, one in which the family praised “Daddy Michael’s” kindness and generosity, and another in which it offered graphic descriptions of the “demonic ways” that characterized the children’s biological father. Janet Arvizo and each of her children made David Arvizo, a warehouse worker for a supermarket chain, out to be a fiend who had beaten and abused them in every conceivable manner before disappearing from their lives. Davellin said David had broken her tailbone during one beating. Her youngest brother, Star, told Miller that his dad had kicked him in the head. Gavin Arvizo claimed that their father had knocked him around even when he was being given chemotherapy treatments. Janet described being slapped, punched, and thrown into walls. Clumps of hair had been torn from her head while the children watched, she said. The violence had been so extreme that she was granted a five-year restraining order that kept David away not only from her and the three children, but also from the family dog, Rocky, who had been abused every bit as terribly as the rest of the family.

  Sneddon had reason to be pleased with this portrayal of David Arvizo, who had told reporters that he believed his wife was making the accusations of sexual abuse against Jackson because she wanted Michael’s money. The thrust of the family’s interview with Bradley Miller, though, was to contrast David Arvizo with the man who, as Janet described him on the audiotape, “delivered [us] from this evil.” Michael Jackson had been the first person to show her children the meaning of “unconditional love,” Janet had told Miller. On the Miller audiotape, Janet and her children spoke of how “safe” and “protected” they felt with Michael, how he had become “the father figure” the kids longed for and seemed intent only on making all of them “as happy as possible.” It was Gavin who had first asked if he and Star could sleep in Michael’s room at the main house, the family all told Miller, because he felt safer there than in the guest quarters, where David could get to him.

  The Miller interview was conducted just two weeks after Living with Michael Jackson aired on ABC, and all of the Arvizos professed to be outraged and offended by what first Bashir and then the media had done to both Gavin and Michael. Now, only a little more than two years later, Davellin Arvizo was telling the jury in Santa Maria that she and her mother and her brothers had made it all up, having been coerced or manipulated into defending Michael Jackson as part of an elaborate plan to smother the truth.

  During her cross-examination, Davellin insisted to Mesereau that no one in her family had ever seen the Bashir documentary, but the jury had already heard Janet Arvizo make a contradictory claim several times on tape. Mesereau let the girl explain that her mother had said a number of things that were exaggerated, then reminded Davellin that it was not only on the Bradley Miller audiotape or on the Marc Schaffel–produced “rebuttal video” that she and her family praised Michael Jackson, but also in interviews with state social workers. Some of what the Arvizos said was true, and some of it wasn’t, Davellin explained. “So you’d lie about certain things, and tell the truth about certain things,” Mesereau asked. “Yeah,” Davellin answered.

  The jury had viewed a section of the famous “rebuttal video” immediately before Mesereau began his cross-examination of Davellin and they would see more of the video each time the attorney prepared to interrogate another Arvizo family member. The panel had watched and listened as the purported victim’s sister described Michael Jackson as “a loving, kind, humble man [who] took us under his wing when no one else would.” More significantly, the rebuttal video was what had given the jurors their first look at the rest of the Arvizo family. They had seen and heard Star Arvizo say of Michael, “He actually seemed more fatherly than, like, our biological father.” They had studied Gavin Arvizo as he said of the man he now accused of molesting him, “He was a loving, kind, humble man, and all he wanted to do was good and happiness.” They had listened at length while Janet Arvizo lambasted both Martin Bashir and the media that had been sent into a frenzy by his documentary: “It breaks my heart because they’re missing out on something very beautiful that they have tainted.” The jury seemed to be paying especially close attention as Janet Arvizo recalled the day her son had asked Michael Jackson, “Can I call you Daddy?” Michael had kindly answered, “Of course.”

  Fourteen-year-old Star Arvizo was supposed to be a far more potent prosecution witness than his older sister. While Davellin had admitted that she never saw Michael Jackson touch either of her brothers in a sexual way, Star’s claims in that regard were graphic. Among the things he had seen in the master suite at Neverland, Star said, were various pornographic sites that Michael Jackson and his friend Frank Cascio had shown him and his brother Gavin while Prince and Paris Jackson were sleeping on the bed nearby. He told Sneddon that when an image of a woman with large bare breasts flashed onto the screen, Michael had joked, “Got milk?” At another point, Star continued, Michael had whispered in his own son’s ear, “Prince, you’re missing some pussy.” Michael also shared porn magazines with him and Gavin, Star said, and simulated having sex with a mannequin while he and his brother watched. Once, while he and Gavin were watching a movie in the bedroom, Michael waltzed in buck-naked, Star said: “Me and my brother were grossed out. [Michael] sat on the bed and said it was natural,” then walked out of the room, still nude. Had he noticed anything “unusual” about Jackson’s appearance on that occasion? Sneddon inquired. No, Star answered. Sneddon asked again, twice, before Star remembered that, oh, yes, Jackson’s penis had been fully erect.

  The jurors were squirming in their seats by the time Star told Sneddon about how Michael had given him and his brother wine while they were flying between Florida and California in a private jet. “He leaned over and handed it to me,” Star said. “I thought it was Diet Coke so I didn’t want to be rude. It smelled like rubbing alcohol. I asked him what it was and he said it was wine.” During that same flight, he saw an intoxicated Jackson licking Gavin’s head (a description that had appeared previously both in Jordan Chandler case documents and in Bob Jones’s book Michael Jackson: The Man Behind the Mask) “for about six seconds,” Star said. Just like his sister Davellin, he had seen Gavin drinking red liquid from a 7 Up can. After a few sips, Gavin “wasn’t acting right,” Star said. “He was, like, saying weird stuff that didn’t make sense.” Star also described a drinking game Michael made the Arvizo boys play in the master bedroom: Each of them had to make a prank call, and if the number they dialed didn’t exist, they had to take a drink of wine. Michael usually called wine “Jesus juice,” Star remembered.

  Star echoed his sister’s story of being held captive by the “unindicted coconspirators” in the case. Dieter Wiesner had told him “always say good things about Michael Jackson” before his appearance with his family in what became known as the rebuttal video, Star said. Frank Cascio had warned him that if he said anything he shouldn’t say, there were “ways that my grandparents could disappear,” Star testified.

  When Star was asked by Sneddon if he had actually witnessed Jackson’s molestation of his brother Gavin, the boy said he had, twice: The first time, “I saw directly onto the bed. I saw my brother was outside the covers. I saw Michael’s left hand in my brother’s underwears (sic).” Two days later, “I went upstairs,” Star said. “The same thing was happening, but my brother was on his back. My brother was asleep and Michael was masturbating while he had his left hand in my brother’s underwears (sic). I didn’t know what to do. I just went back to the guest r
oom where my sister was sleeping.”

  Sneddon finished with Star by asking if Michael Jackson had ever warned him to keep his mouth shut about what went on in the master suite at Neverland. Yes, Star said: “One time, me and my brother and Eddie Cascio were sitting on the bed and [Jackson] told us not to tell anyone what happened, ‘even if they put a gun to your head.’ He told us not to tell Davellin anything. He was afraid she might tell our mom what we were doing.” What was it they were doing? Sneddon asked. “Drinking,” Star answered.

  Mesereau began his cross-examination by bringing back the image of the Barely Legal magazine that Star had identified (after Sneddon projected it onto a screen for everyone in the courtroom to see) as the one Michael Jackson shared with him and Gavin. Yes, that was the magazine, Star told Mesereau, who promptly pointed out that the date on the magazine was “August 2003”—months after Arvizo family’s final visit to Neverland Ranch. Star began to squeeze his hands together. “I never said it was exactly that one,” he testily told the attorney. “That’s not exactly the one he showed us.”

  The defense attorney’s cross-examination segued to the deposition Star had given in a civil case that had been brought by the Arvizo family against JCPenney some years earlier. Mesereau wanted to save the details of the case for Janet Arvizo’s appearance on the stand, but the jury got the gist of it. Back in 1999, Gavin Arvizo had “taken” an item of clothing from a JCPenney store to try to “trick” his father into buying it. Security guards followed the Arvizos out of the store and then, according to the family, they roughed up and groped Janet Arvizo. The Arvizos eventually won a six-figure settlement, but it was now clear that the family had fabricated evidence and perjured themselves in depositions. Among the claims Star had made in that case was that his parents never fought and his father never hit him. “Were you telling the truth?” Mesereau asked. “No,” Star admitted, far too readily. Mesereau asked why he had lied, and Star replied dismissively, “I don’t remember. It was five years ago. I don’t remember nothing.” When Mesereau wondered if “someone” had told him to lie in the JCPenney case, Star gave exactly the same answer to the question that his sister Davellin had: “I don’t remember.”